


The Modern Age

by Waterloo



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, F/M, James is a naive baby, M/M, Mental Health Issues, One Big Happy Weasley Family, Post War Problems, Teddy is a damaged darling, Unrequited Love, Vic holds everyone up, Vic just tries, except not
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-14
Updated: 2016-08-14
Packaged: 2018-08-08 16:07:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7764337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Waterloo/pseuds/Waterloo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She cannot save the boy made out of ashes.<br/>Though she did try.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Modern Age

Teddy is all angles and broken hearts. He is a boy built out of disasters. He wears tragedy and difference and separation like robes. A scarecrow with bones made out of burnt out matches and flesh so rough and torn and thick, it could pass for straw. Teddy is all sharp edges and smashed glass and she falls in love with him without realising any of that.

She blames her parents too much. She blames afternoons in the 'early days'- when half her uncles and aunts weren't married and none of her cousins were born and it was all fresh relationships and healed wounds and new hope. And them. The two kids, underfoot and over loved. They spent every day in sun lit gardens, chasing each other. It used to be Teddy chasing her. He would catch her round the waist and Uncle Harry would tease his godson about crushes until he let go in embarrassment.

That has changed now. She chases him and he won't admit that he's running, but the uncles and the aunts, married now, and the cousins, all born and too loud and too nosy, still coo over them like its romantic. Like its all a big love story. The boy who lost everything to the war, and the girl who gave everyone hope when it was over. Teddy and his victory girl.

She blames her parents too much- but on bad days where she has watched Teddy destroy himself for a bit too long, she things she doesn't blame them enough. She just wants to be Vic.  
Vic, who is made out of flour and eggs and butter. Vic, who learnt everything she knew from Molly Weasleys kitchen and her mothers French catalogues and her Aunt Ginny's ferocity. She is ferocity and anger and kindness. She is sunshine in winter. Cold, weak, but still shining like its pretty. She is built out of expectations she didn't have time to live up to. She is built out of disappointment. But she is never just herself.

She is fifteen when she first hears the phrase. _I am not my brothers keeper._ And maybe the genders are all wrong and maybe there relationship is anything but fraternal on the days where Teddy has had too much to drink and Vic hates herself too much to say no, but it is the first time she has ever felt empowered. _I am not Teddy Lupins keeper_.

She is not there to make sure the flame doesn't catch. She was not born to save Teddy Lupin from the wreckage they call his mind. She could walk away anytime she wanted and be her own person.

Except she doesn't.

Except it is so hard to stop watching a flame and Teddy is no flickering candle. He is blue and purple and white. All the colours that people see as cold but really mean stay away. This flame with burn you out. A roman candle that can walk. A body burning with pretty pink hair and a smirk that could be handsome in some lights.

Teddy Lupin is not handsome to her. She stops finding destruction beautiful after the first time it almost breaks her too. She doesn't crave his touch, or even his love. But Teddy Lupin is hers to save.

She is not _her lunatics keeper_ , not really. She could stop anytime she wanted. She could spend Saturday night with her phone turned off and she could be completely naive to all the ways you can forgive a person for the things they do when they are more alcohol and other things she doesn't like to think about then they are human. She could stop saving him anytime she likes.

She doesn't.

She doesn't stop picking up his calls, even when they're at four in the morning and they break her heart so much that sometimes she has to cast a silencing charm and scream until her throat hurts. She doesn't stop holding his hand while he sobs. She makes sure he eats three meals a day and she tries to make sure that he loves himself enough not to force it all back up. She isn't sure she succeeds. He's so thin she thinks he'd break if she ever let any of that bubbling, coiling, hot anger out. She thinks she could shove him and he'd die.

But she does try.

And she is eighteen now and there is a world she wants to explore. There are sunset fruit drinks on sun baked beaches. There are actual sunsets in fifty different countries and she wants to see them all. She wants to know the exact shade of pink that Spain gets at four in the morning. She wants to know what a sunset looks like when she isn't worrying if Teddy has gone to sleep yet.

But she gets to country number three before she is reminded that the world has never just been Teddy and her. Maybe that would have been okay, but her life has always been crowded with an abundance of siblings and aunts and cousins and family friends and she has to care about all of them.

And so she is called to the home front because fucked up Molly is in the hospital and fucked up Dominique is knocked up and her Maman and Aunty and Gram want to know where the hell she was when all her fucked up cousins and siblings were getting so fucked up. She wants to tell them that it's in the blood, but she knows that isn't true. It's in the air.

She wants to tell them that there wasn't a chance in hell that the older ones weren't going to get fucked up by there parents past. She wants to tell them that these were the kids that grew up being taught that there family had died for a better world, and yet they still lived every day in a shit one. She wants to say that she tries her best. She wants to point out how sane she is.

But she isn't quite sure if that's true.

So she holds Molly's hands and tells her she doesn't have to starve herself to be pretty and hugs Dom when she admits how stupid she's been and she watches Freddie a bit too closely. Freddie has to be the drop off point. Sixteen year old Freddie has to be the last one she has to worry about. The rest, the babies, she does not have to worry about them.

Not yet.

And Teddy Lupin manages to fuck up her life even when she owns a bookshop and goes on dates once a month and drinks coffee like it's a religion. Even though she's a real, fully fledged adult now. He has to fuck it up even though she's being normal. Well, pretty much normal. Maybe she doesn't sleep and sometimes she doesn't eat and there is a scab on her thigh that she won't let heal but otherwise she is fine.

She was fine.

 And then Teddy waltzes into her tinderbox existence and he is so much worse. He is so much worse because now he wants to be better. Now he has his heart set on being just as normal as everyone else and Vic isn't cruel enough to tell him that fucked up people don't get better. They just learn to cope.

But she helps him quit drinking. She helps him get a job. She helps him get better. She makes him wash his skin, which, by now, is more scars than the freckled expanse it had been when they were five and sometimes she just wants to understand why Teddy keeps them. She wants to make him shift his skin, make everything new again. She wants to point out that Teddy will never be fixed because being fucked up is all Teddy has left.

 _I am not your keeper. I am not your keeper_.

But they strike a new existence together and for a few years Vic deludes herself because that's what she's good at. The bookshop gets business, her dates never get dull, Teddy never makes the flat too messy. And when Teddy brings home a nice boy with green eyes and blonde curls Vic tells him she us proud and doesn't blink an eye.

Her parents still ask about an engagement at every birthday for her baby niece. Lily still pesters Teddy about being a real part of the family. James still sulks anytime it is mentioned and they both endure it because neither one of them want to admit the truth. Vic is perfectly happy alone and Teddy is not _her way inclined_.

Molly doesn't die and her niece is a bundle of, illegitimate, joy and Freddie seems relatively stable and Vic thinks maybe she has borne the brunt of it all, now.

But Teddy's knight leaves him and he won't tell her who the new lad he has is except that seventeen year old James keeps shooting these glances and Victoire forgot to factor in the Potters. She forgot to factor in forbidden love.

Yes, Teddy Lupin is not her problem, not really, but her baby cousins most certainly are and suddenly she is spending Sunday dinner watching the way Rose orders everything around her into a perfect order and can't let anything go and Al can't seem to smile these days and James is so goddamn naive and Lily, baby Lily, is the Slytherin no one expected.

And its not like she can't handle it. Except that she is tired in her egg white bones and frazzled in the very butter of her hair.

She tries to tell herself that it is not her duty to save a dying family. She could escape this fire. She could leave. But she has been breathing in the smoke for years and she knows that whatever she does now, she is part of this.

And so she is godmother Victoire. Al works Sundays at the shop with her and she hands out too many complements and let's him spend all day reading the books that practically raised her instead of actually doing any work. He smiles when he goes home and at the end of the summer he hugs her and Vic doesn't mind the wasted wages.

She delegates Rose. Hands her aunt a book on OCD with the word ROSIE written across the cover in black sharpie and she just hopes that Hermione has the sense to help. She does care. She wants to tell Rose how to deal with the three in the morning thoughts that won't stop and the twitch under your skin when something is out of place and that feeling you get sometimes, like maybe you were born with your bones backwards.

But she doesn't.

She chases after Teddy like she always has and she tries to catch up before he takes anyone else down with him.

James Potter is an idiot and a child and she has never met anyone who she saw more of herself in than she did in him. She knows what needs to be done when she realises that James doesn't love Teddy because he is broken. James is not another member in the Teddy Lupin fascination club. He does not find Teddy's destruction beautiful

He just loves him.

She has never pitied anyone else more. But James is too young to know the truth of Teddy Lupin. Vic is the one that takes out bin bags of glass bottles and listens to Teddy every time he tells her he is getting better. Vic is the one who cannot tell where the colours that make up Teddy Lupin and the ones that make up Vic end, or begin. They have run. Merged. Vic knows what it is to love a broken man. To be a broken mans victory.

She is not his keeper, but she can be his damage control.

She tells Teddy all the ways he will break James by loving him. She shows him all the way he has broken her. She opens his eyes to the truth of their fucked up family. She makes him understand how great James could have been, if Teddy hadn't touched him.

And when Teddy won't wake up the next day, even when she shakes him so hard she can feel his matchstick bones rattling inside his stuffed skin, she doesn't hate herself as much as she should. It rips her apart and leaves half of her colour stained on a body she loved and hated and raised and killed. But she does not feel guilt. Vic knows that everyone is made of something. It is not her fault that a body made of ash and carbon and destruction, crumbled.

 _She was not his keeper_.

But she did try.

She never stops blaming their parents. She never holds a birthday party or even celebrates it at all. Not on that day. She never stops blaming that goddamn war.

But on the days when her body starts to feel more ash than flour, she recites all the bodies still alive. Freddie, Al, Molly. Her sister. Her brother who never knew any of this. who never, ever will.

James. And maybe sometimes she understands the look in his eyes more than she would ever want to, but at least he is alive. He laughs and it doesn't seem fake and that, that right there, is a victory  
She couldn't save Teddy Lupin, but that is not her fault.  
She tried.


End file.
